Native Authors Summer Reading

An Garagiola (Bois Forte Band of Chippewa) is a mother, graduate student, researcher, and writer born and raised in the Twin Cities. An works a data sovereignty specialist at Little Earth where she supports urban food sovereignty initiatives, and in the office of Native American Affairs at the University of Minnesota where she helps to coordinate projects such as TRUTH, a collaboration with MIAC and the 11 recognized tribal nations to tell the past, present, and future of University-Tribal relations. 

Broadly, An uses Indigenous research methods/analyses and modes of communication via cultural literary production to interrogate how colonial policies and ideologies (re)construct, control, marginalize, and suppress histories, voices, and knowledges. She seeks to complete and correct narratives colonial society has told about Native Americans. As a mixed-race Anishinaabekwe, her blend of poetry, research, and advocacy is a personal reflection of her lived experiences. An’s writing spans a breadth of subject matter including poverty, disability, addiction, suicide, love, loss, and Indigenous eroticisms. As she reclaims Anishinaabemowin, An seeks to incorporate it whenever possible. Trained in creative writing and policy analysis, her work is interdisciplinary, rooted in Indigenous Feminisms, and in the belief that healing happens in circles of relationality with ourselves, others, and the land.

Kyle X. Hill, Ph. D., M.P.H is Ojibwe (Turtle Mountain Band; Enrolled Citizen), Dakota (Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe), Lakota (Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe). Dr. Hill is a storyteller and poet, grounding his use of story from his comedic, but all too often tragic, experiences living on several different reservations, as well as urban areas, grappling with poverty and the devastating consequences of settler-colonialism and Christianity. Dr. Hill was born in Mni Luzahan, or Rapid City, SD. Dr. Hill is a licensed psychologist, currently an assistant professor with the University of North Dakota, school of medicine and health sciences, department of Indigenous Health. He currently lives on his Dakota and Anishinaabe traditional homelands in St. Paul, MN. Dr. Hill is also a veteran of the U.S. Army and enjoys traveling in the summer as a grass dancer on the powwow trail.

Sarah Wheelock (Ponapikwa) is a writer born in Iowa, who makes her home in the Twin Cities. A member of the Meskwaki Nation (People of the Red Earth) and bear clan, Sarah works in the legal field and serves the people of Minnesota as a judge for the Court of Appeals.

Sarah‘s professional experience involves significant writing in the legal realm, but she also enjoys creative writing. Since she was a child, Sarah has written poems and short stories, and dreamed of writing the next great novel of our time. Sarah believes that fiction writing and story-telling are inherently human activities that help us make sense of the world and environments we inhabit. Sarah is a language learner of Meskwaki (Meshkwahkihaki), an Algonquian language spoken by her ancestors and relatives from The Settlement. A self-identified bibliophile, Sarah enjoys superheroes, science fiction, memoirs, historical fiction, philosophy, and poetry, as well as books about gardening, brain tanning, crafting, and more, and she owns more books than she has shelf space to store or time to read. In recent years, Sarah began submitting work to the University of Iowa’s Write Now Flash Writing Competitions, securing an online publication of her piece Kunsi’s Feather in 2020. Sarah‘s writing focuses on her lived experience as a bi-racial Indigenous woman navigating complex systems of identity, power, and family, and her relationality to all of Creation. Sarah strives to be a good relative to all and an amazing mother to her cubs.